My Love/Hate Relationship with Outlines

Months ago, when I started this blog, I expressed how much I hate the dreaded outline. Outlines and I are not friends. I glare at Outlines, they glare right back, demanding that I give them the time of day

Outlines are deadlier than Hitokiri Battousai

While I do enjoy the smut gig, I take the weekends off to focus on tightening up my concepts for The Tomorrow Trilogy. I’ve been reading blogs geared towards writing and plotting for a long time, and I realized a while ago that Books 1 and 2 don’t have a clear antagonist — Book 3 certainly does (The Resistance, and by extension, Mitchel). There’s a vague one for each book, and I have the basic political plots underneath the surface — it’s firming up the antagonist and bringing that political plot to the surface where I struggle.

This is where outlining comes in. I have a full outline for Book 1, have a partial, old outline for Book 2, and Book 3’s hasn’t even been reconceived, but i’m sure it will be once I finish with Book 2’s outline. The character arcs are all clearly there — thank you, brain, for being character driven. Staring at my completed outline for Book 1, I realized that the big, political plot and antagonist isn’t really introduced until Chapter 9, which is 1/3 of the way through my outline.

Uhhhhh, what?

I have a feeling today is going to be spent reorganizing the outline, firming up the plot, and cutting some parts to make room for plot. I thought I was done. I thought I could write it, now.

Nope. Still gotta get the outline in shape before I do that. But for the first time in months, I’m hearing the words and seeing the scenes unfold. All because I identified a main problem with my story’s current structure through having a completed but imperfect outline, in the first place.